Hold tight. We're on a giddy spin through the upper realms of hyperbole. Paul Mariani, poet, biographer, and Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts, has taken the raw material of Hart Crane's short life and fashioned it into a breathless paean to "the ineffable Word", swollen with rhapsodic commentary on Crane's poetry. Crane was the very model of the Romantic poete maudit, whose alcohol-poisoned, self-destructive life, and death by suicide from the deck of a ship at the age of 32, secured his mythical status, throwing "a white glare" as Mariani puts it, over his work - and, evidently, over Mariani himself.
Surviving a Cleveland childhood clouded by his parents' broken marriage, the 17 year-old Crane escaped to New York, the city of "cyclopean giants" and "tantalean promise" that he loved "bitterly, ecstatically". He enjoyed some early poetic success and was published in the small poetry magazines and journals that flourished there in the 1920s - before falling out with most of their editors. Spectacular drinking binges and secret homosexual flings with sailors followed, interspersed with demoralising attempts to earn a living as a copywriter and factory worker, among other things, until self-doubt, writer's block, isolation and chronic alcoholism led to his suicide from a ship's deck on his return from Mexico.
Crane's search for tolerable work, and later for a wealthy patron, his humiliating efforts to coax money from his estranged father, resorting to suicide threats on one occasion, are a reminder of the difficulty for writers to survive in an era before state-sponsored grants and writer-in-residence schemes. Crane was temperamentally unsuited to teaching, or to any other steady employment for that matter, and wanted simply to write. By the time he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931, his life had already lurched out of control, with frequent arrests for drunken brawling. His travels on the Guggenheim proceeds to France and Mexico brought him no peace ("wherever he went it was only himself he found waiting there") and he was incapable of writing anything of note.
The figure of the suffering artist, living on the edge, fuelled by drink and drugs, has an enduring appeal, especially in 20th-century American cinema and literature. Youthful promise, burning bright before burning out, still has dazzling potency and Paul Mariani has drunk deep: his prose has been filtered through the technicolor lens of a Jack Kerouac or Henry Miller, with a Ginsbergian howl flung in for good measure. His Prolegomenon declares his faith: "something in the man continues to draw us irresistibly . . . for a splendid moment we had a poet in the right time and in the right place to grace us with a vision of what God might look like if God should ever visit us as a city, as I must believe he came and came again to Crane." His biography is an act of imaginative empathy, or even ventriloquism. As he glosses the "orphic intensity" of Crane's more obscure lines, he becomes the poet's mouthpiece, too close to his volatile subject to allow any critical distance. The effect is the opposite of what he intended: the reader feels disinclined to return to Crane's work, some of which is, frankly, unreadable.
At its best, the poetry Crane left behind, especially the collection White Buildings and the extended lyric sequence, The Bridge, celebrates the promise of the early 20th century, embodied in the burgeoning American city. (Mariani: "that sidereal infinity, bleeding starlight as in some cosmic crucifixion of the world.")
Excitement at the possibilities of industrial and technological progress combine with Hart's heightened sense of the mythical past, of lost ancient cities and layers of civilisation, to create a poetic voice that echoes the spirit of Whitman, the symbolism of Mallarme and Baudelaire and, thematically, T.S. Eliot. Eliot was unavoidable for any poet engaging with urban experience in the 1920s, and Crane, though reluctantly admiring Eliot's mastery of craft and form, chafed against The Waste Land's bleakness. He wanted his series of long, interlinked lyric poems, The Bridge, to be an optimistic response to Eliot, an uplifting evocation of the contemporary city and its ancient antecedents, with Brooklyn Bridge and the Hudson River as its central images. It begins on a note of hope:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty . . .
In earlier poems such as `For the Wedding of Helen and Faustus' Crane attempted to revitalise the classical poetic tradition, which for him had become threadbare and conventional. He sought a synthesis of ancient and modern, (Mariani: "a reality evanescent as a fragrance yet beyond refutation") seeing "Homer's Helen sitting across from him in a Cleveland streetcar, modern jazz as a correlative for the sacred music invoked for the Eleusynian [sic] mysteries, modern trench warfare recalling the smokey ruins of Troy."
The Bridge takes this quest further, striving towards a "higher consciousness". It culminates in the `Atlantis' section, where Hart's references include Pocahontas and Columbus, evoking the "discovery" and settlement of America in highly elliptical language, suffused with what Hart called the "bright illogic" of metaphor. Even Mariani has to admit that in its layering of metaphor, symbol and abstraction, the poem is opaque, if not impenetrable - though he manages to find this admirable: " `Atlantis' is a poem whose words strain to breaking point to enmesh in their netting the single multitudinous Verb containing all language . . ."
On he goes: "most poetry resides somewhere in the middle register between the demotic on the one end and the orphic on the other. But `Atlantis' seems to begin two octaves above the higher end of the scale and to ascend from there. The poet invites the eye upwards . . ." By this stage the reader is suffering from altitude sickness and struggles with the urge to fling this book from the top of Brooklyn Bridge - or, come to think of it, any bridge.
Helen Meany is an Irish Times arts journalist.